Ask today's children to name a pirate and they'll probably say Johnny Depp rather than Long John Silver or Captain Hook. For me,Treasure Island still tops the skull-and-crossbones chart, but maybe the clever way to wean children off seemingly endless Pirates of the Caribbean DVDs and on to Robert Louis Stevenson is to give them this entertaining and extremely bloodthirsty history of pirates, privateers and corsairs from ancient Rome to modern Somalia. All the big names are here – Barbarossa, Francis Drake, Henry Morgan, Captain Kidd, Blackbeard – and some I've never run into before, such as Anne Bonny and Mary Read, whose masculine dress fooled the legendary captain Calico Jack into letting them join his pirate crew. Or the diabolical Trinidadian John Boysie Singh, who cut out his victims' hearts and rubbed them, still warm, over his horses' hooves to make them go faster. Punctuating the biographies and useful facts about retired Barbary Coast corsairs incubating chicks in camel dung are graphic descriptions of favourite piratical tortures, headed "Gruesome Alert", which PC parents will probably veto. Don't be wet. Kids are tough. They'll enjoy hearing how, for instance, one Chinese pirate dealt with a hostage who hadn't come up with the ransom money. The unfortunate man was forced to squat in a bamboo cage squashed down with a heavy lid for 14 years, which made him so deformed that when released he could walk only on all fours. Hence his nickname, the Dog Man. Not for the squeamish.

My new alternative to Fantastic Mr Fox for keeping small, wilful children shtum at bedtime is this enchantingly old-fashioned story about a delightfully old-fashioned 12-year-old orphan, reminiscent of Oliver Twist, called Johnny Trott. Dahl's characters are mostly funny but cruel caricatures; Morpurgo's are far more human. The writing apart, what really sells this audio is its reader, Paul Chequer, who sounds just like a cheeky 12-year-old himself. It's a great period story without all that tiresome Little Lord Fauntleroy schmaltz. It's 1912, Johnny is a bellhop at the Savoy hotel ordered to escort a visiting Russian opera singer to her suite and carry her cat basket. It changes his life. Now read on.

Never mind those carefully selected anthologies for four-, five- and six-year-olds. Give them the real thing. OK, he's watered it down a bit – there's no sinister roosting hawk holding Creation in its talons, and the malevolently grinning "killer from the egg", Pike, is now about as sinister as a pet goldfish. But Hughes reading anything sends shivers down my spine.

Joe Spud lives in a house with 12 sitting rooms, 47 bedrooms, 89 bathrooms, a giant-screen cinema in the basement, a recording studio in the attic, five swimming pools and a Formula 1 racing car. For his 12th birthday his dad, who made his billions from Bumfresh double-sided loo paper, gives Joe a cheque for £1m but can't take him to Burger King because he's going on a date with a 19-year-old Page 3 girl. Being rich and going to a school that costs £200,000 a term, where the boys are called Nathaniel, Bertram, Lysander, Edmund, Humphrey, Percy, Quentin, Tristram, Sebastian, Theodore, Clarence ("And that was just one boy"), is no fun because he has no friends. I like cautionary tales, and this Little Britain riches-to-rags variety is funny. But Belloc's are funnier and mercifully bum-free.